The New Monuments, Marcia Bassett + Samara Lubelski Duo, Lasse Marhaug

Thu 05 Apr, 2012, 8pm

Release party for Marcia Bassett & Samara Lubelski’s album Sunday Night, Sunday Afternoon on Graham Lambkin’s KYE label. Improv trio The New Monuments (C. Spencer Yeh, Ben Hall, and Don Dietrich) and Oslo-based noise artist Lasse Marhaug will both perform on the same evening.

Lasse Marhaug has since the early 90s been one of the most active artists in the so-called Norwegian noise scene. As a performer and composer he has contributed to well over 200 CD, vinyl and cassette releases over the years, as well as extensive touring and performing live in Europe, Asia and America. In addition to his solo work, Marhaug plays regularly in projects Jazkamer, Nash Kontroll, DEL and Testicle Hazard. Past projects and bands include Origami Replika and Lasse Marhaug Band. He has collaborated with several artists in the fields of noise, experimental, improv, jazz, rock and extreme metal, as well as working with music and sound for theatre, dance, installations and video. He works with different kinds of instrumentation; from guitar-pedals and homemade electronics to computers and modified guitars, but considers the mixing board his main instrument. Marhaug was born in the northern regions above the Arctic Circle of Norway, but currently lives and works in Oslo.

Sunday Night, Sunday Afternoon is the debut LP by the duo of Marcia Bassett and Samara Lubelski. Both musicians have played crucial roles in the development of underground sound over the last 20 years, tinting the broad waters of abstract folk, chromatic noise and longform drone, and cementing themselves as cornerstone artists in the process. Sunday Night, Sunday Afternoon is the perfect synthesis of Bassett and Lubelski’s individual crafts – two sidelong forays into deep black string meditation that hang in the air like ghosts on Ludlow Street. Sunday Night, Sunday Afternoon was recorded/mixed by Barry Weisblat in 2010 in Brooklyn, NY, and arrives in a high gloss monochrome sleeve, in an edition of 500 copies.

New Monuments is a response to inactive history. NM recognizes energy is more easily lost than obtained. NM stands with entropy in opposition to a mechanistic world view. NM treats power failure with a mood of euphoria. NM recognizes the only way to even attempt to reverse entropy in the energy crisis is to recycle garbage, waste, literally. NM sees waste as the opposite of luxury and reckons both are useless. NM encourages a systematic reduction of time, a million years contained in a second. NM believes abstraction rules in a void but only pretends to be free of time. NM prefers mistakes and dead ends over proven problems. NM regards problems as unnecessary because problems represent values that create the illusion of values. NM deem chance and planning to be the same.

After a series of limited-edition live recordings on American Tapes, New Monuments’ debut LP was released by Important Records in 2009.